Dispatches from the Quarter: We Interrupt this programming
We interrupt this scheduled broadcast -
I know this next blog entry is supposed to be part 2 of “Little Pink Houses,” but all you Tom Petty fans are gonna have to wait.
I don’t ever want to be the crusty old geezer that complains the sky is falling, or as the Simpson’s cartoon so accurately put it, “Man Yells at Cloud.” I don’t think people are meaner, kids are ruder, or there’s more violence than there used to be. I think the 24/7 news cycle is a two edged sword, so we’re more likely to hear about more acts of crime and meaness than we used to.
I don’t think a “skyrocketing” divorce rate is proof of our moral decline; I think it might mean that more unhappy people are getting out of “quiet desperation-“ or desperately unhappy situations, and that the number of unreported incidents of spousal abuse and chronic emotional neglect - the sort of things that sometimes lead to the abuse of alcohol, laudanum, heroin, prozac or valium - are down as a result. Face it, the drug of choice these days is Cocaine and its cousins - drugs that give you more energy and more hours in the day. You aren’t looking for more hours in each day if you desperately hate your life and need to escape an abusive situation or spouse.
I don’t think we’re more prone to violence; I just think we have better hardware. I think the percentages of kids (and adults) who turn to violence is no higher than it ever was: it’s just that the only weapons a kid could get his hands on, on the playground were fists, sticks, and rocks. It’s the same kids fighting, for all the same reasons: the only difference is, today’s kids can get access to knives, guns and automatic assault weapons. So where a fight over honor or a girl or all of the above, might result in a black eye and a few bruises thirty years ago, that same fight, with the same kids, with the same emotions, becomes deadly because the weapons are more powerful, not because the kids are worse.
Dueling was a key component of early Creole society in New Orleans.. It was honorable. It was fun. It was something to do on a Saturday night when you couldn’t score with the debs or the quadroons. Accidentally (on purpose) bumping into someone was cause for a duel. So was looking at someone cross-eyed. If you wanted to impress a young woman with the depth of your ardor, you took mock offense where none was given, and declared that you were going to defend her honor. Off you went, just a block away, to St. Peter’s chuch courtyard, to hold your duel, and, in reality, show off the new strokes and techniques you’d learn from the duel masters and fencing experts who’d traveled over from the continent. Duels were only fought to first blood. And sometimes simply to first scratch. If someone actually died from a duel, it was considered a freak accident, and the “victor” pined for years. That was the way of the very sophisticated, gentle, highly evolved, French-based Creoles. The mistake came in letting the two fisted, beer swilling, nightly brawling, brash, crude, distempered, undignified Americans (Kentucks) into the game.
Rather than fencing rapiers or dueling foils as the weapon of choice, chosen by the challenged, American trappers, woodsmen, bargemen, boatmen, sailors and roustabouts, who enjoyed a higher level of violence as entertainment on any given Friday night, these uncouth near-savages started choosing knives, axes, pikes, chains, and finally, *accurate* guns whose bullets could actually kill rather than just leave a flesh wound, for the duels. And suddenly the “first blood - it’ll leave a dashi ng scar,” wounds that could be bound up in just a few minutes, in time for the two duelists to go back into the party and buy each other a beer, became duels to the death.
So what’s the point of all this apologetic dissembling of violence and history? It’s just a smoke screen to allow myself to play a round of “I remember when....” while convincing myself that I’m not an old fuddy-duddy, I havcn’t become one of those geezers.
So, rationalizations aside -only the Cat’s Meow (karaoke) Razoo (70's rock), and Famous Door (everything from blues to techno to funk) played music so loud it could knock you off the sidewalk as you walked by. Now all the clubs are louder, but the live bands can’t even begin to compete with the ear-bleeding volume of the recorded music coming out of the beads, T-shirts and other cheesy souvenirs, shops. The Marshal amps set in the entry way facing the street might have something to do with that.
I remember when there were at least four solid blues clubs on Bourbon St. That generally occupied the same 4 buildings, despite how many times the clubs changed their name.
I remember when at one intersection, you had the Cat’s Meow on the up & away from the river corner, the Maisson Bourbon Dixieland Jazz club on the down/away from the river corner, the blues and R&B club, Krazy Korner, on the up/toward river corner, and Johnny Whites, restaurant and local barfly/serious drunks pub, on the down/toward river corner. And, I remember when the 3 music clubs had their volume levels equalized so you could hear the club you were standing closest to with ease, and didn’t have your ears acting like a chaemeleon on acid trying to blend with a silver hologram image unless you were standing in the exact middle of the intersection.
I remember when Krazy Korner and Old Opery House were two of the best blues clubs in the French Quarter.
I remember when there were more live music clubs than empty, Mafia-front frozen daquiri bars on Bourbon.
Of course, I also remember when walking upriver from Iberville Street on Bourbon was a sure fire way to get mugged, and walking down river of Esplanade, even, or maybe especially, if you were headed to Check Point Charlies, was likely to get you in a biker bar fight.
Upriver of Iberville has become the classiest section of Bourbon St., by far, just in the past eight years. And downriver of Esplanade has turned become a burgeoning local, quality jazz, blues, and good restaurant area known well to locals and kept mostly a secret from the tourists.
I remember when I couldn’t figure out which direction was upriver and which was down, because the Mighty Mississippi twists and turns, and sometimes flows south to north, depending on the bend, along the Lousiana banks. So I knew that N’awlinians told directions by upriver/down river and toward river/away from river, ‘cause the compass points are pretty much useless in this particular river bend, but I was too embarrassed to ask which end was up and which end was down, and so I kept getting lost in what is only about a five by nine block neighborhood.
I hate that Bourbon Street music is quickly and surely becoming a contest of volume rather than musicianship and quality. But I really like that more blocks of the French Quarter are safe to walk on at night.. And, even if Bourbon no longer maintains as solid a musical standard as it used to, the quality and talent of the individual musicians hasn’t gone down. Most of the crap is canned and clubs and venues are opening up off- (and sometimes far, far away, from) Bourbon, but at least they continue to thrive.
We now return you to the originally scheduled Part 2 of “Little Pink Houses” or “Can’t Drown the Spirit.” Probably.
© Tina Jens, 2008. All rights reserved.
I know this next blog entry is supposed to be part 2 of “Little Pink Houses,” but all you Tom Petty fans are gonna have to wait.
I don’t ever want to be the crusty old geezer that complains the sky is falling, or as the Simpson’s cartoon so accurately put it, “Man Yells at Cloud.” I don’t think people are meaner, kids are ruder, or there’s more violence than there used to be. I think the 24/7 news cycle is a two edged sword, so we’re more likely to hear about more acts of crime and meaness than we used to.
I don’t think a “skyrocketing” divorce rate is proof of our moral decline; I think it might mean that more unhappy people are getting out of “quiet desperation-“ or desperately unhappy situations, and that the number of unreported incidents of spousal abuse and chronic emotional neglect - the sort of things that sometimes lead to the abuse of alcohol, laudanum, heroin, prozac or valium - are down as a result. Face it, the drug of choice these days is Cocaine and its cousins - drugs that give you more energy and more hours in the day. You aren’t looking for more hours in each day if you desperately hate your life and need to escape an abusive situation or spouse.
I don’t think we’re more prone to violence; I just think we have better hardware. I think the percentages of kids (and adults) who turn to violence is no higher than it ever was: it’s just that the only weapons a kid could get his hands on, on the playground were fists, sticks, and rocks. It’s the same kids fighting, for all the same reasons: the only difference is, today’s kids can get access to knives, guns and automatic assault weapons. So where a fight over honor or a girl or all of the above, might result in a black eye and a few bruises thirty years ago, that same fight, with the same kids, with the same emotions, becomes deadly because the weapons are more powerful, not because the kids are worse.
Dueling was a key component of early Creole society in New Orleans.. It was honorable. It was fun. It was something to do on a Saturday night when you couldn’t score with the debs or the quadroons. Accidentally (on purpose) bumping into someone was cause for a duel. So was looking at someone cross-eyed. If you wanted to impress a young woman with the depth of your ardor, you took mock offense where none was given, and declared that you were going to defend her honor. Off you went, just a block away, to St. Peter’s chuch courtyard, to hold your duel, and, in reality, show off the new strokes and techniques you’d learn from the duel masters and fencing experts who’d traveled over from the continent. Duels were only fought to first blood. And sometimes simply to first scratch. If someone actually died from a duel, it was considered a freak accident, and the “victor” pined for years. That was the way of the very sophisticated, gentle, highly evolved, French-based Creoles. The mistake came in letting the two fisted, beer swilling, nightly brawling, brash, crude, distempered, undignified Americans (Kentucks) into the game.
Rather than fencing rapiers or dueling foils as the weapon of choice, chosen by the challenged, American trappers, woodsmen, bargemen, boatmen, sailors and roustabouts, who enjoyed a higher level of violence as entertainment on any given Friday night, these uncouth near-savages started choosing knives, axes, pikes, chains, and finally, *accurate* guns whose bullets could actually kill rather than just leave a flesh wound, for the duels. And suddenly the “first blood - it’ll leave a dashi ng scar,” wounds that could be bound up in just a few minutes, in time for the two duelists to go back into the party and buy each other a beer, became duels to the death.
So what’s the point of all this apologetic dissembling of violence and history? It’s just a smoke screen to allow myself to play a round of “I remember when....” while convincing myself that I’m not an old fuddy-duddy, I havcn’t become one of those geezers.
So, rationalizations aside -only the Cat’s Meow (karaoke) Razoo (70's rock), and Famous Door (everything from blues to techno to funk) played music so loud it could knock you off the sidewalk as you walked by. Now all the clubs are louder, but the live bands can’t even begin to compete with the ear-bleeding volume of the recorded music coming out of the beads, T-shirts and other cheesy souvenirs, shops. The Marshal amps set in the entry way facing the street might have something to do with that.
I remember when there were at least four solid blues clubs on Bourbon St. That generally occupied the same 4 buildings, despite how many times the clubs changed their name.
I remember when at one intersection, you had the Cat’s Meow on the up & away from the river corner, the Maisson Bourbon Dixieland Jazz club on the down/away from the river corner, the blues and R&B club, Krazy Korner, on the up/toward river corner, and Johnny Whites, restaurant and local barfly/serious drunks pub, on the down/toward river corner. And, I remember when the 3 music clubs had their volume levels equalized so you could hear the club you were standing closest to with ease, and didn’t have your ears acting like a chaemeleon on acid trying to blend with a silver hologram image unless you were standing in the exact middle of the intersection.
I remember when Krazy Korner and Old Opery House were two of the best blues clubs in the French Quarter.
I remember when there were more live music clubs than empty, Mafia-front frozen daquiri bars on Bourbon.
Of course, I also remember when walking upriver from Iberville Street on Bourbon was a sure fire way to get mugged, and walking down river of Esplanade, even, or maybe especially, if you were headed to Check Point Charlies, was likely to get you in a biker bar fight.
Upriver of Iberville has become the classiest section of Bourbon St., by far, just in the past eight years. And downriver of Esplanade has turned become a burgeoning local, quality jazz, blues, and good restaurant area known well to locals and kept mostly a secret from the tourists.
I remember when I couldn’t figure out which direction was upriver and which was down, because the Mighty Mississippi twists and turns, and sometimes flows south to north, depending on the bend, along the Lousiana banks. So I knew that N’awlinians told directions by upriver/down river and toward river/away from river, ‘cause the compass points are pretty much useless in this particular river bend, but I was too embarrassed to ask which end was up and which end was down, and so I kept getting lost in what is only about a five by nine block neighborhood.
I hate that Bourbon Street music is quickly and surely becoming a contest of volume rather than musicianship and quality. But I really like that more blocks of the French Quarter are safe to walk on at night.. And, even if Bourbon no longer maintains as solid a musical standard as it used to, the quality and talent of the individual musicians hasn’t gone down. Most of the crap is canned and clubs and venues are opening up off- (and sometimes far, far away, from) Bourbon, but at least they continue to thrive.
We now return you to the originally scheduled Part 2 of “Little Pink Houses” or “Can’t Drown the Spirit.” Probably.
© Tina Jens, 2008. All rights reserved.